ASP.NET, XML, SQL and Javascript tips and tricks

If you work with SQL Server that is set to use UK (British English) format you may experience a strange behavior: when you try to assign a date that is in ‘yyyy-mm-dd’ format to a DateTime variable or insert it into a DateTime column – an error is thrown

The conversion of a varchar data type to a datetime data type resulted in an out-of-range value

or similar. Or even worse – no error is thrown, but an incorrect date is inserted. This is happening because even though ‘yyyy-mm-dd’ looks like universal ISO format, a UK SQL Server interprets it as ‘yyyy-dd-mm’. So a date like ‘2011-07-21’ will throw the above error, but the date ‘2011-08-01’ will be stored as ‘January 8, 2001’ instead of expected ‘August 1, 2011’.

To alleviate this problem simple add a time part to your date – make the format ‘yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss’. So the dates above will become ‘2011-07-21T00:00:00’ and ‘2011-08-01T00:00:00’ and be interpreted correctly by SQL Sercer

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Infragistics UltraWebGrid allows you to set width of a column in client-side JavaScript, you can do it using code similar to this:

igtbl_getGridById('xmyGrid').Bands[0].Columns[3].setWidth(someValue)

But, while executing this code on the client, you may get a nasty surprise by getting following error from the server:

Input string was not in a correct format. Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.

Exception Details: System.FormatException: Input string was not in a correct format.

Source Error:

An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the current web request. Information regarding the origin and location of the exception can be identified using the exception stack trace below.

Now, you do know that your someValue is definitely a number, why this error then? Let alone – why client-size resize causes a server call? But I will leave this to Infragistics. Actual cause of the error – number not being Integer. If you change the code from above to